Rocket Man

probably not. a quark perhaps? it has the advantage of existing over a very small portion of the force gradient.

think of it in terms of kinetic energy, the more mass of air you have in your downwash, the more momentum you can have for less energy. a plane has a longer wing span than a chopper so it moves more air more efficiently. the prop on a model plane provides relatively little force. if the rotor on a chopper makes a downwash of the same mass per time as a plane, it's going to have the same lift for the same efficiency. the problem with a chopper is the uneven drag on the rotor. the tips move very fast and the inside provides very little lift. you need quite a hefty motor to give enough torque. high rev motors are invariably lighter.

for a bypass, you could use a normally closed relay in parralel with the charger to control the output to the circuit. (when the mains are on, the relay removes the batteries from the circuit) if you use a common ground, the normally open portion can link the charger to the batteries when there's voltage on the mains. you should probably put all the batteries in parrallel, then they can run at optimum voltage or close to it. a 12V charger shouldn't be too expensive.

a capacitor has about the best power-weight ratio untill you move into respectable energy ratings. i've pulled one of those cars apart before, the steering mechanisim is pitifully simple. it's a magnet between two counter wound solenoids. i assure you, you cannot control enough of the aero dynamics on a chopper with just 2 channels. if you're going to use one of these, i'd suggest making a plane.

.99 C? you're thinking of cosmic rays. i would be surprised if solar wind moved at even a small fraction of c. there's quite a lot of energy in an aurora, most of which is converted into light. but if you compare it with the light from the sun, i'd be concerning myself more with a freznel and a sterling cycle rather than a giant sheet of foil.

you can "pass through" the event horison if you term it as though it were a boundary. the thing is, it's not a boundary. it's a point on the gravity gradient where by light is doppler shifted to zero in an attempt to escape. matter can pass this boundary without being torn to shreds if it's small enough and has enough tensile strength.

the planetary rings are made of debris, each chunk follows a slighly eliptical orbit such that the collective boundaries are circular. if the ring were solid and spinning, you'll still have unbalanced forces wouldn't you? the thing is a single satellite so if it moves out of equilibrium, the closer side experiences an attraction greater than the further side. the ring would still spin on it's own axis but would behave (orbitally) as though it were stationary

i realise it's a trade mark, but the term used in context can give alternate inspiration which can be safely marketed.

this is likely to be highly impractical, but is it possible to get a decent rail gun effect using ionised gas as the rails?

"cyclone". that word makes me think of running a small blower through a chamber with the balls running around the outside walls, also, you could have an injector run a blast of air as you pull the trigger to put a ball in line (lower track?) with an outlet tube which leads to a modified breech.

well, yes, theoretically. an aurora is a foci of charged particles, basically solar wind. unfortunately, they're going slowly, each particle has rather little velocity and therefore usable voltage attatched after it's been through a few kilometres of atmosphere. also, radiation like that is notorious for having incredibly low current. if you manage to erect a square kilometre of silver mesh right in the centre of the aurora, you might just have enough power to run a torch.

are cosmic rays photons? i thought they were all manner of particles at really high energy.

enough beta(+) is still capable of something similar to The Thought's avatar. it's not quite enought to cause it to cease to exist, but i doubt you'd be able to use it as evidence in court afterwards.

live in australia and say that! airconditioners do not release CFCs. it's a perfectly sealed system unless it breaks. otherwise it would simply fail after a couple of hours work. also, i'm not sure the ozone has much effect over limiting total radiant energy growing more trees is not the answer to reducing carbon dioxide. trees absorb carbon, and release it when they die, forests have a limit to the density of biomass.

of course, he never mentioned anything about the practical side of it. actually, it would be very interesting if it were possible to cause matter to collapse directly into energy.

depends how you do it. if you use heat, certain parts will decay before others liquify, but you can mash them under high pressures and temperatures to get a liquid by all practical definitions.

if you approach a visible light source very close to c, the photon you see will be doppler shifted up, but also increased in frequency due to your time dialation. the closer you get to c, the higher the frequency gets. basically, there's no limit to how high you can shift a photon so there's no limit to how high energy a photon is. it's all determined by your inertial frame. a high energy gamma ray requires a particle to interact with before it can under go pair production. it needs to interact with something locked to an inertial frame

if you throw enough antimatter at it...

neat, so the optimum would be a rotor with a bit of drag and a low negative lift at zero airspeed. how does the rotor respond to changes in the camber of the blades? is it much the same as a chopper once it's spining?

are you looking for a heightened firing rate or a more reliable reload? basically, a hopper is a hopper. and you can't really do much to make it better unless you're prepared to modify the gun itself. what gutz suggested was that you actually inject air between the bottom two paintballs after every shot, blasting one of them into the barrel. if you're starting with a bought gun, you'd be better off trying out parts at a shop.

cern was not obliterated on verification of the first anti proton, nor was it demolished when the performed the same anihilation reaction at relativistic speeds. antiproton - proton annihilation releases decay products, mostly light. basically, you're expelling energy out the back. i didn't beleive it at first, but a fixed energy equivalent of propellant (kinetic energy included) will provide momentum directly proportional to the velocity. http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=24521 if you can get a fixed energy equivalent of propellant moving at c (regardless of it's rest mass), the momentum of the space ship will behave like the mass of decay products were accelerated to c under newtonian dynamics. (until of course you reach an appreciable velocity, in which case you can take a new refrence frame and start over)

i've seen a concept car that runs on liquid nitrogen, it passes the cold gas through a sort of radiator as it vapourises to run the cylinders without freezing them solid.

are you looking for hopper style or magazine fed... or chain fed. i've seen a few different designs, enough to fudge together something that will work. also, what materials are you looking to use and what pressure are you working with? if you can machine metal parts you may be able to boost the reload rate without turning your gun into shrapnel.

they generally try to make the recongition system more or less as-you-type. if the strokes aren't quite what it expects, it'll look for the closest match. sometimes before you finish the character. let me guess, a T becomes an L before to put the dash on it? there are some text to type converters that work on images, perhaps you could try one of them. or do you actually need the live update?

in a particular language, the term commonly translated to "ghost" refers to people who have little or no direct affiliation with you. basically, someone is a ghost until they become an aquaintence. what is morally right is different between ghosts and friends. so the definition of morality by suffering is in one sense flawed. we see from a very narrow feild of veiw. different people answer differently to moral dillemas. in my opinion, morality is defined person by person as a mix between the learned "how things normally are" and their own empathic sense of pain.